Rugged Mobile Hardware Market Saw $813 Million In Revenue Shipments In Q1 2016
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Quarterly report examines the state of the rugged mobile hardware marketplace.
The total rugged mobile hardware market — rugged notebooks, tablets, vehicle-mounted devices, and handhelds — grossed nearly $913 million in revenue shipments and saw over 975,000 units shipped across the globe in Q1 according to findings from VDC Research’s Rugged Mobile Quarterly Shipments Q1 2016 Report.
The research also showed notebooks saw a return to growth for the first time since 2004 while tablet and handheld sales dropped. According to the VDC Research blog, “EMEA posted the highest increase in revenues of $15.7 million (36.9 percent) YoY; with the Americas and APAC posting a $9.1 million (7.3 percent) and a $2.6 million (10.5 percent) YoY revenue increase respectively. The rugged notebook market is starting to benefit from increased channel stability and should see these benefits continue to push revenues upward for the next few quarters.”
The overall market continues to struggle as YoY revenues for Q1 shrunk to sub-$1 billion levels, and the market saw weakened global revenue shipments for rugged tablets, handheld/PDA computing devices, and forklift-mounted computers in the YoY comparison.
Meanwhile, by region, the Americas saw significant revenue losses in the handheld device space over Q1 2015, largely the result of significant Q1 2015 contracts and deployments. Meanwhile, in EMEA and APAC, handheld devices saw renewed growth, posting small gains over last year. The rollout of Windows 10 mobile enterprise by Microsoft is also a factor as their success hinges largely on customer buy-in.
The rugged tablet market struggles with increased competition from the consumer grade hardware vendors who can offer devices at low costs, especially in bulk deployments, and are increasingly attractive as alternatives for workflows that do not necessarily require dedicated rugged devices.
Meanwhile, the hybrid 2-in-1 tablet/notebook form factor continues to do well in this marketplace. The report found, “The opportunity for 2-1 hybrid devices can be leveraged in markets which rely heavily on textual input capabilities of a physical keyboard coupled with the efficient touchscreen navigation of a tablet.”
The latest report covers quarterly market-share from 2016 for leading rugged hardware vendors by form factor. The report also contains numerous market share segmentations and year-over-year comparisons, both globally and by specific region.